The bill he supported is limited; it works by allowing people to borrow from their future selves. It covers only leaves for babies or newly adopted children under 6; it does not cover care for sick family members or to take care of personal medical problems. And it does not guarantee that a person’s job is protected when taking the leave. The bill he supported is limited; it works by allowing people to borrow from their future selves.

When balancing work and family becomes difficult, women tend to resort to caregiving and men to earning money.

Unpredictable schedules can be brutal for hourly workers, upending their lives. Black and Hispanic women had the worst schedules, and white men had the best, the researchers found.

The idea, a favorite of social conservatives, is now supported by several Democratic presidential candidates. The general idea behind the proposals is that children need care — and families take a financial hit to provide it, whether they buy child care or stop working.

Female doctors are more likely than other professionals to have children and keep working. The reasons offer lessons for other jobs.

Even as child care is setting up to be an issue in the presidential campaign, a more basic question has recently resurfaced: whether mothers should work in the first place.

“A lot of focus has been on what we can do in the hospital immediately following childbirth, but less on mothers’ home environment, which is where the vast majority of women spend most of their postpartum time. What we’re saying is one important component of that home environment is the presence of the father or another adult caretaker.”

They’re still held to a higher social standard, which explains why they’re doing so much housework, studies show.

Even though long, unpredictable hours have become a feature of many jobs, and people who work them now earn disproportionately more, some employers have figured out how to cede more control over where or when work gets done.

Just as more women earned degrees, the jobs that require those degrees started paying disproportionately more to people with round-the-clock availability. At the same time, more highly educated women began to marry men with similar educations, and to have children. But parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother.